Open-Source
80+ High Quality And Useful Resources For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In October
We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web” on SmashingApps. In this, we made a list of 80+ High Quality And Useful Resources For Designers. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.
You are welcome to share if you know more best of the web in the month of October which our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
Design Tips, Tricks and Tutorial
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50+ High Quality Icon Design Tutorials (Part 2)
55 Terrific Cinema 4D Tutorials and Techniques
Create a Realistic Looking Nokia 5800 in 3ds Max
How to Create Roads and Rail Tracks on a Path
40 Adobe Illustrator Text Effect Tutorials
A Beginners Guide to Digital Textile Printing
Create a Transparent Text Effect with Fresh Grass Texture and Custom Brushset
75 PSD to HTML Resources for Web Designers
The Ultimate Round-Up of Print Design Tutorials
Design A Killer Fashion Model Poster
How to Create Smoky Brushes and Type In Illustrator CS4
50 Hot New Tutorials From Around The Web
45+ Adobe Illustrator Tutorials for Creating Cartoon Character Illustrations
Design a Minimal and Modern Portfolio Layout with Photoshop
How to Create an Icon in Illustrator
30 Advanced Photoshop Tutorials for Gamers
Blog Headers: 20 Great Examples and Best Practices
Build a Slick Rich User Interface in Photoshop
40 Quality Photoshop UI Design Tutorials
Artwork, Digital Photography and Inspiration
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50 Awe-Inspiring Underwater Photos
21 Adorable Pieces Of Manga Art
100+ Clean, Simple and Minimalist Website Designs
15 Fabulous Examples of Origami Inspired logo Designs
39 Astonishing Examples of 3D Typography
35 Smart Logos With Second Thought To Make You look Twice
11 Amazing Photo Manipulated and Digital Art Wallpapers
A Showcase of 35 Beautiful Typographical Illustrations
40 Beautiful HDR Pictures You Would be Amazed
Trends in Pricing Page Design and Layout
14 Bold and Colorful Print Ads from Various Brands
44 Examples of Nature Inspired Website Designs
35 Creative Twitter User Profile Designs
Showcase Of Beautiful Textured Web Designs
23 Eco Friendly Sites that are Using WordPress
30 Superb Examples of Infographic Maps
Website Design Showcase Of 21 Popular Brands
30 Jaw Dropping 3D Character Creations
45 Inspiring Navigation Menus That You Must See
15 Inspirational Single-Page Websites
10 Unforgettable Interactive and Inspirational Business Cards
105 People Photo Manipulation Works You Will Really Marvel
40+ Beautiful Fish Inspired Logos
25 Absolutely Magnificant Landscape Photo Manipulation
Showcase of Social Networking Websites
15 Elegant Cartoon Wallpapers You Can Not Miss
40 Striking Examples of Graffiti Art
24 Awesome Single Page Portfolio Designs
80+ Photo Manipulations Art to Ignite Your Creativity
Javascript and Ajax
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How to Build a Simple Content Slider jQuery Plugin
35 Fresh and Useful jQuery Plugins
Curtains Opening Animation with jQuery
xHTML and CSS
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Mastering CSS Coding: Getting Started
The Blueprint CSS Framework – Tutorials, How-to Guides and Tools
Purely CSS – Faking Minimum Margins
Resources
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Most Useful Collection of Premium 3d models
1000+ High Quality Free Grunge Textures, Icons, Brushes and Fonts
45 Beautiful Dual-Screen Wallpapers
30 Stunning Fonts To Enhance Your Designs
Collection of 8 Free and Exceptional Icon Sets
80 Stunning Background Patterns For Your Websites
9 Open Source Microblogging Applications
500+ Free Download High Quality Photoshop PSD Files For Designers
24 High Quality Free And Stunning Symbol Fonts
50 Surprisingly Amazing Themes for Blogger
40 Amazing Photoshop Brush Directories and Collections
Miscellaneous Articles
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20 Best Wordpress Typography Plugins To Enhance Readability
How to Properly Prepare a Guest Post in 5 Simple Steps
5 Highly Applicable, Yet Easily Overlooked Features in Photoshop
The History and Evolution of Social Media
20 Useful & Nicely Designed Web Applications
24 Useful Tutorials on Creating Photoshop Brushes
30+ Super Secret OS X Features and Shortcuts
15 Most Important Wordpress Plugins To Help You Fight Spam
Guide to a Successful Blog Post
8 Powerful Wordpress Plugins You Probably Don’t Use But Should
9 OpenSource URL shortening apps to make your own services
7 Key Principles That Make A Web Design Look Good
Windows Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows 7
20 Handy Photoshop Tips For a Faster Workflow
10 Useful WordPress Coding Techniques
11 Most Popular Open Source Softwares Of All Time
Today we are listing here 11 Most Popular Open Source Softwares Of All Time in which most of them are cross-platform. You might not be able to enjoy all the features as commercial software but it will really help you to perform your task in a better way when your pocket does not allow you to purchase paid software.
You are welcome if you want to share more Open Source softwares that we have missed here and you think our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
You may be interested in these older posts
23 Brilliant Web Apps To Simplify Designer’s Work Life
11 Most Popular Cross-Platform And Free Softwares
13 Most Useful Free Scripts That You Should Know
13 Simplest Free Web Tools That Are Absolutely Useful
5 Useful And Free Photo Viewers For Your Mac OS X
7 New And Useful Free Sites With Unique File Hosting Features
11 Premium But Free And Useful Web Apps For Designers
31 Power Tools For Twitter Lovers To Make Lives Easier
13 Premium-Like Wordpress Themes That Are Free And Stunning
13 Simple And Elegant Free Wordpress Themes
The 5 Best Free File Hosting Services To Store Your Files
7 New And Useful Free Sites With Unique File Hosting Features
Firefox 3.5 sets the pace with dozens of new features, including the smart location bar, one-click bookmarking and blindingly fast performance. Avoid online scams, unsafe transactions and forgeries with simple site identity. View Web pages faster, using less of your computer’s memory.
FileZilla is a cross-platform graphical FTP, FTPS and SFTP client a lot of features, supporting Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and more. FileZilla Server is a reliable FTP server for Windows. It has a powerful Site Manager and transfer queue and drag & drop support.
7-Zip is a file archiver with the high compression ratio. The program supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CHM, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, ISO, MSI, WIM, NSIS, RPM and DEB formats.
FullSync is a universal file synchronization and backup tool which is highly customizable and expandable. It is especially for developers, but the basic functionality is easy enough for everyone.
Gimpshop is a hack made on top of the original Gimp project which changes all menues, dialogs, etc., in order to make them look as much as their counterparts in Photoshop. This makes users who are already familiar with the layout of Photoshop feel right at home in this open source application. Please note that all features in Photoshop in not available in Gimpshop, since it is based on the Gimp project and it’s feature set.
ClamWin is a free antivirus for Windows. It includes virus scanner, scheduler, virus database updates, context menu integration to MS Windows Explorer and Addin to MS Outlook. Also features easy setup program. Uses a well respected ClamAV scanning engine.
OpenOffice is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment. This is based on a powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.
TightVNC is a free remote control software package. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.This is a cross-platform, available for Windows and Unix, compatible with other VNC software.
Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems. It includes tools for modeling – fast subdivision surface and polygon tools, multi-resolution mesh sculpting, metaballs, NURBS, vector fonts, and curves; uv mapping; shaders and texturing – both paint based and node based; ik and fk animation tools with rigging, constraints, skinning, morph targets, drivers, deformers, and modifiers; simulation tools including hard bodies, soft body, cloth, and fluids; and particle systems including hair. Blender has integrated rendering with both its native renderer and the raytracer Yafray as well supporting many external renderers; and python based scripting.
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files, cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together etc.
CamStudio, An Open Source And Free Streaming Video Software
CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).
CamStudio can also add high-quality, anti-aliased (no jagged edges) screen captions to your recordings in seconds and with the unique Video Annotation feature you can even personalise your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself “picture-in-picture” over your desktop.
And if all that wasn’t enough, CamStudio also comes with its own Lossless Codec that produces crystal clear results with a much smaller filesize compared with other more popular codecs, like Microsoft Video 1.
- You can use it to create demonstration videos for any software program
- Or how about creating a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions?
- You can create video tutorials for school or college class
- You can use it to record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support people
- You can use it to create video-based information products you can sell
- You can even use it to record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favourite software program, before you forget them
OWA, An Open Source Web Analytics Framework For Many Popular Applications
The Open Web Analytics (OWA) framework provides a generic set of PHP and HTTP APIs that application developers can use to integrate web analytics into any application. The OWA framework also comes with built-in support for popular web applications such as Wordpress and MediaWiki. As a generic web analytics framework, OWA can be extended to track and analyze any web application.
To download the latest releases of OWA, please click here.
Tracking/ReportingÂ
- Track Page views, visits, and unique visitors over time
- Track unique, new, repeat visitors over time
- Multiple Web Site Support – track any number of web sites and view statistics in aggregate or by site
- Click-streams – view the actual click-stream of each visitor
- Click Tracking – Track where exactly on a web page users are clicking and view clicks by browser type
- Click Heat Maps – view a heat map of where users are clicking on your web pages
- Google Maps – map your visitors on Google Maps
- Google Earth (KML) – view your visitors in Google Earth via a KML file export
- RSS/ATOM subscription tracking – track unique feed readers, reader types, and feed requests
- Visitor Aging – understand the age of your repeat visitors.
- Canned and Custom Time Periods – generate reports using pre-defined reporting periods or custom date ranges
- Refering Page Analysis – View the title, anchor text, and surrounding text of inbound links from refering web pages
- View visits by user agent
- Track entry and exit pages
- Track pages by custom page types
WordPress Specific Features
- Track visitors by WordPress user name or e-mail address they use in comments.
- Track all Wordpress Page Types (Posts, Pages, Authors, Archives, Categories, etc.)
- Track the number of comments made by visit
- Reporting accessable via Admin Dashboard
- Track subscribers to RSS/Atom feeds
Ten Rock Solid Free Platforms To Start Your Successful Website
Now a days, unlimited websites are coming live everyday to take part in the internet world. They can be classified in business sites, blogs, social networking sites, directories, forums, e-commerce sites and many more other creative ideas applied to do something that has never been done. Today, We are compiling a list of Ten Rock Solid Free Platforms To Start Your Successful Website. These free web applications can be use in diversified ways to get your customize results for your fresh and new websites. You can easily find their showcase of running websites to get inspiration and ideas.
You are welcome to share more free web apps/platforms that will help our readers to start their multi-function websites. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
Pligg is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that you can download and use for free. Pligg CMS provides social networking software that encourages visitors to register on your website so that they can submit content and connect with other users. Our software creates websites where stories are created and voted on by members, not website editors. Use Pligg content management system to start your own social networking community in minutes.
With a large and highly customisable set of key features coupled with a standards compliant interface, phpBBâ„¢ will grow with, and complement your website. With millions of installations worldwide, it is no wonder phpBBâ„¢ is one of the most popular ways to create and support a community.
Magento is the eCommerce software platform for growth that promises to revolutionize the industry. Its modular architecture and unprecedented flexibility means your business is no longer constrained by your eCommerce platform.

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.
The PrestaShop e-Commerce Solution was built to take advantage of essential Web 2.0 innovations such as dynamic AJAX-powered features and next-generation ergonomy. PrestaShop guides users through your product catalog intelligently and effortlessly, turning intrigued visitors into paying customers.
jobberBase is a great open source job board software for anyone. You can get online your job posting website with jobberBase. It’s easy to install and configure to start your job board.
YouTube, MySpace, Odeo, Flickr, Match and Facebook – all in one, customizable and under your full control. You’re limited only by your imagination – not by the software. Dolphin Smart Community Builder is a universal, free, open source software that allows you to build any kind of online community. With a huge variety of features & options, you can quickly launch your own very unique and successful website.
Freeway is the most advanced Open Source eCommerce platform and Freeway offers selling methods only previously available in enterprise class or niche bespoke systems. Without having to purchase a commercial system and then paying a developer to build a custom installation, Freeway does what you need out of the box. Of course Freeway is great for selling products but it also sells events AND services AND subscriptions. From appointments and time based bookings to event ticketing and subscriptions Freeway is the eCommerce platform.
PHPizabi is one of the most powerful social networking platforms on the planet. With literally thousands of websites powered by PHPizabi including everything from simple friends sites to the most complex networking super sites out there. Easy to install, use, and raising the bar on what it is to provide a reliable, fast, social networking package to raise your business to the next level.
Updated*
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
An Open Source Data Visualization Framework For Charts And Graphs
Axiis is an open source data visualization framework designed for beginner and expert developers alike. Whether you are building elegant charts for executive briefings or exploring the boundaries of advanced data visualization research, Axiis has something for you. It gives developers the ability to expressively define their data visualizations through concise and intuitive markup. Axiis has been designed with a specific focus on elegant code, where your code can be just as beautiful as your visual output. By leveraging {inline} Flex Binding and the Axiis markup syntax you don’t need to write volumes of code to produce amazing results. In fact, some of the more complex Axiis examples have no more than 200 lines of code.
Axiis was designed to be a granular framework, allowing developers to mix and match components and build complex output by compositing together basic building blocks. We have specifically avoided long OO inheritcance chains to keep our classtructures flat and interchangeable. In Axiis you create visual complexity through engineering simplicity.
Axiis is an open source project, under an MIT license. This means you can use it for personal projects, commercial work, and pretty much anything you can think of with no restrictions, we just ask you keep our copyrights and license within the code.
An Open Source And Free Invoicing Web Application
SIWAPP is an open source web application meant to help manage and create invoices in a simple, straightforward way. Using a swapp is comfortable and everything is placed where you are expecting to find it.
This web application will also be able to work as a module -interconnected through its API to many otner business management applications- which takes care -the easy way- only of the billing of the company.
Siwapp is built on Symfony, a PHP web development environment, which heavily rests on MVC ideas (model, view, controller). This environment allows us to develop “Extreme Programming” techniques, as well as guarantee a proper application evolution in the future.
SIWAPP is
- Simple & straightforwards
- Comfortable
- Useful
- Pretty
- Flexible
- Productivity – oriented
- Anywhere
- Secure
- Supported
OpenGoo, An Open Source And Easy To Use Web Office
OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office. It is a complete solution for every organization to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents. You and your team can create and collaborate on:
- Text documents
- Spreadsheets (coming soon)
- Presentations
- Task Lists
- E-mails
- Calendars
- Web Links
- Contacts
OpenGoo gives you all the tools to manage the work of all the divisions of your company. You can plan and manage all your projects, easily following the status of every task.
There is the mashup approach. This means OpenGoo takes many existing OpenSource projects, and “glues” them by developing tools to easily integrate them and make them look and feel like one single application.
Yes, there is the classical approach, where they build a new piece of software. This will be the case when no OpenSource alternative convinces the OpenGoo team.
It seems, they aim to develop a system that is:
- Easy to install
- Cross-platform
- Secure
- Open Source
- Easily Extendable
Congratulations To The Winners of Visifire
Thank you for all of the participants of contest in which Visifire, Giving Away 10 Developer Licenses Of Worth $99 Each. We and Visifire selected these 10 best commenter and decided to give them free Developer Licenses of Visifire.
Visifire is a set of open source data visualization components – powered by Microsoft® Silverlightâ„¢ & WPF. Visifire is a multi-targeting control which can be used in both WPF & Silverlight applications. Using the same API, charts in both Silverlight & WPF environments can be created within minutes. Visifire can also be embedded in any webpage as a standalone Silverlight App. No Silverlight knowledge required. Visifire is independent of server side technology. It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML. Don’t take our word for it! Visit Visifire Gallery or design your own chart using Chart Designer or watch Screencasts.
Congratulations to all the winners from SmashingApps.Com. All of the winners will be contacted via email within 15 days. If you are not winner at this time so please be patient and keep visiting here or subscribe our rss feed because we are very soon coming up with another new great contest.
Thank you Visifire for sponsoring this wonderful contest at SmashingApps.
If you want to conduct any contest at SmashingApps just contact us and send us all the details.
TaskJuggler, A Modern And Powerful Open Source Project Management Tool
TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful, Open Source project management tool. Its new approach to project planing and tracking is more flexible and superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools. It has already been successfully used in many projects and scales easily to projects with hundreds of resources and thousands of tasks. TaskJuggler is Open Source software licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.
TaskJuggler provides an optimizing scheduler that computes your project time lines and resource assignments based on the project outline and the constraints that you have provided. The built-in resource balancer and consistency checker offload you from having to worry about irrelevant details and ring the alarm if the project gets out of hand. The flexible “as many details as necessary”-approach allows you to still plan your project as you go, making it also ideal for new management strategies such as Extreme Programming and Agile Project Management.
Features and Highlights
- Manages tasks, resources and costs in one package
- Automatic resource leveling, tasks conflict resolutions, and task filtering
- Comprehensive and flexible views and reports so you can find the information you need when you need it
- Built-in templates to get you started (you can also save your own schedules as templates for future use)
- Project tracking and status reporting
- Graphical User Interface to conveniently edit your projects, view and generate Gantt charts and reports
- Unlimited number of scenarios (baselines) of the same project for what-if analysis
- CSV data export for exchange with Office Suites
- Risk analysis
- Project breakdown and management team support
- Flexible working hours and vacation handling
- Support for shift working
- Multiple time zone support
- Tasks may have initial costs, finishing costs
- Resources may have running costs
- Support for profit/loss analysis
- HTML and XML report generation
- Powerful project description syntax with macro support
- Support for central resource allocation database
- Generation of iCal files for data exchange with standard productivity tools














































































































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